


Sunshine, Riptide, Daylight

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Bonding, Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Have a Good Relationship, Billy Hargrove Is Bad at Feelings, Billy Hargrove Tries to Be a Better Person, Child Abandonment, Childhood Memories, Emotional Baggage, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Emotionally Repressed, Gen, I promise it's not that bad, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Repressed Memories, Suicide Notes, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24979012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: She found them in his sock drawer, buried deep under bunched-up socks and banknotes tossed haphazardly over the top. She shouldn’t have pried, but she saw her name on one of the letters in Billy’s messy, scrawling script, and she just couldn’t help herself.The first letter was written on crumpled paper like it had been balled up and unwrapped too many times to count, and the page was now smooth and soft. It was tearstained, and Max ran her fingers over the darkened spots. ‘Little shit’ was crossed out at the top, and it started with Max.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Billy Hargrove's Mother, Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield
Comments: 10
Kudos: 70





	Sunshine, Riptide, Daylight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucdarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucdarling/gifts).



> Listen, I need to be CLEAR, this is not a fic about suicide or suicidal thoughts from any of the characters!! But Billy wrote Max a letter during his time possessed by the Mind Flayer where he was basically saying goodbye and stuff, so it still kinda falls under that tag, but it's not as gruesome or graphic as it may seem, alright?? OK. Good. 
> 
> I really needed to write this, so I did! I'm not sure how well it turned out. I'll leave you guys to be the judge of that, but it only took me a little while to write, and it's honestly giving me a headache, so I'm going to edit it and put it out as soon as possible haha. I feel like I've got so much to do!! I don't know. Also, I still can't believe that the ST section has so many fics from me?? I've never even watched it! What am I doing!! I've got so many other things I should be writing for!! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this and hope that it turned out better than I suspected it has haha. Thanks for reading!!
> 
> (This is also for @lucdarling who left a lovely comment on my last Stranger Things fic and who said they liked my Billy and Max fixed, so I hope you enjoy this!)

There was no real, conceivable reason for Max to be alone in Billy’s room, mid-afternoon on a weekday.

Neil and Billy were both at work, and a sewerage pipe had burst at the school, so all the students had been given the day off while they brought someone down to inspect it. So while everyone else was out, and it was just Max and her mother in the house, a rare occurrence indeed, Susan decided that this dreary day with dark storm clouds overhead and a quiet household would be the perfect time to do some housework. 

Max ended up with the duty of washing and folding the clothes. She had been forced to duck into the bedrooms to collect the dirty clothes off the floor, even Billy’s, where she knew to check under the bed for when he kicked them under when Neil came in, and Susan had given her the most dazzling smile that Max felt warm all the way down to her toes.

She carried a basket with her to all the bedrooms and folded the clothes while she was in there. She did Neil and Susan’s room first because she knew that the longer she did this, she would be sure to run out of steam by the end, and she wanted to put at least a little bit of effort in for Billy’s room.

It had been an easy morning. The motion of pulling the clothes from the basket, folding them, putting them in the drawers was comforting in its repetitiveness, something easy to do while she thought. The house didn’t change much. When Neil or Billy would put a hole in the wall, it would be patched up the next day before the other got home from work. The sheets on the beds never changed. Neither did the pictures on the walls, nor the items in the kitchen, or the clothes in their closets. Well, Max got new clothes. Billy didn’t. Not unless he took the initiative to buy them for himself, which wasn’t often.

She shut his bedroom door behind her when she entered Billy’s room. It smelled the same as it always did, of sweat and chlorine and smoke and bad cologne. His bed was still messy and unmade, the covers tossed over the bed for some semblance of cleanliness. But Max knew better than to assume that this time would be different and adjusted the covers closer to the pillows to straighten them out because she knew that if Neil walked in, he would blow a gasket. She rolled the weights out of the way and into the corner. She picked up some of the things that had fallen on his hand-made vanity in his rush to get ready this morning and placed them upright again. 

Billy’s clothes were all mostly the same. He didn’t own very many shirts, and his pyjamas were just as sparse, so she didn’t really have much to do in his wardrobe, and moved on to spend the most time on his drawers. Dimly, she was aware of rain beginning to fall on the window.

She found them in his sock drawer, buried deep under bunched-up socks and banknotes tossed haphazardly over the top. She shouldn’t have pried, but she saw her name on one of the letters in Billy’s messy, scrawling script, and she just couldn’t help herself.

The first letter was written on crumpled paper like it had been balled up and unwrapped too many times to count, and the page was now smooth and soft. It was tearstained, and Max ran her fingers over the darkened spots. ‘Little shit’ was crossed out at the top, and it started with  _ Max _ . It read, in various degrees of messiness and legibility, and she had to navigate around blocks of black markings where he had crossed out words:  _ I don’t know how to tell you this. I don’t know if you’d even understand. Something’s wrong with me, Max, and I don't know what it is. I don’t know how to fix it. There’s something wrong. Like a voice in my head, making me do things, making me hurt people. I think I hurt Heather. I think I hurt you. Everything just feels wrong, like my skin doesn’t belong to me. I want it out of me. I want him gone. But I don’t know how to make it stop. I think I’m going to die soon, Max. I don’t know if it’ll kill me, or if I’ll kill myself, but I can feel it coming faster than I want. If I die, know that I didn’t hate you as much as I said. You’re my little sister, and I care about you. I love you sometimes, even. But I think I’ll be gone soon. I don’t know how long I have left. But when I die, you can have my favourite jacket and my Camaro. Don’t break it. I paid good money for that thing, and if anything happens to it, you'll regret it. I’m sorry. _

Max found herself on the floor before his chest of drawers, her legs folded under her, the letter grasped so tightly between her fingers that she worried she was going to tear through it. She read it over five more times, her chest tightening each time she made it through to the end, before she slowly placed it beside her on the floor. She picked up the second letter.

It was addressed to his mum, and it was obviously written when Billy was younger. The writing was more childish, the language more petulant. Max wondered if he had just never sent it, or if it had been sent back.  _ When are you coming home, mum? I miss you. Dad is getting violent again, and he gave me a black eye last week. I had to use the makeup you left behind because he didn't want the teachers to get upset. Please come home. I promise I’ll be better! I’ll do whatever you want! But please don’t leave me here anymore. Please take me with you.  _ It was ripped on one corner, folded harshly at some places, and there was a childish crayon drawing at the bottom of Billy and his mother, Neil nowhere to be seen.

The third letter was addressed to Susan and Neil, and it was laden in anger and spite, and Max felt a swell of pride in her chest to read Billy stating, very blatantly, how much he hated Neil and everything he stood for, and how he pitied Susan for marrying him, but how he hated her too for being complacent and forgiving of Neil’s atrocities.  _ If I ever get the chance to be a father, _ he finished it,  _ I know exactly how not to treat my kids. _

There were a handful of more letters, all written by Billy at various stages of his life, some left unfinished, some so long that they spanned the length of multiple pages and were held together by a paperclip. There were a few more addressed to his mother, many more addressed to Max, each of them ending in the same phrase, _ I’m sorry _ , but when she finally read through them all and placed them in a neat pile on the floor by her side, she moved onto the other objects when she got the chance and held them in her grasp just as carefully as she held the letters.

The first object was a postcard of sunny California, and it looked like a painting. The sun, pure and bright, glittered off the water in dazzling lights, and the sand looked like gold dust. There were people on the beach, some with surfboards dug into the sand, others with towels and umbrellas set up. There was an ice-cream van in the far corner. Across the top, it read, 'Wish you were here!' in big red letters. On the back were the date and a short message from Billy to himself, a reminder of the place he loved. Max knew the sight and missed it almost as much as Billy did. That beach was his life, and she knew that he hated being so land-locked here in Hawkins.

She put it aside and cradled the other objects in her palm. One was a scratched up brass key. The other was a pretty rock, smooth and perfectly round. There was a ring hanging from a chain, and after a moment, Max realized it must have been his mother's wedding ring, the matching one of Neil’s. There was a locket that contained a tiny version of his mother’s photo. A short strand of ribbon, still soft. A perfect seashell, no longer smelling of the ocean. Polaroids of Billy and his mother and Max had never seen Billy smile so big, so genuinely. His hair framed his face, and his eyes were full of laughter. In some pictures, he was missing his front teeth. She was pretty and wore a big floppy sun hat with a ribbon, but her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there for, staring at the polaroid, but her task was long forgotten, and she vaguely heard her mother humming to herself through the rest of the house.

Billy found her there hours later when he came home from work, and when he opened the door to his bedroom, exhausted and cold and soaked to the bone, he found her sitting with her legs folded under her with his secret collection in her hands. It was only when he shut the door quietly behind him that she glanced up, looking a little sheepish and guilty, but not ashamed. “Uh,” Billy said. “What are you doing in my room?”

Max turned back to the things in her lap. She angrily wiped at the tears on her face before they could fall. She didn’t even realize she was crying. “You’re home early.”

“Yeah, it was raining,” Billy replied as he slung his bag off his shoulder and dropped it unceremoniously on the bed. His wrist was still wrapped in a bandage from this morning, and a bruise spread up the length of his arm. “They let us go home early because there weren’t any kids. What are you doing in my room, Max? I’m not going to lie, this is really fucking weird.”

Wiping at her nose, Max held the photo out for Billy to see. “I was just putting your clothes away. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snoop on your things but… some of these letters have my name on them,” she put the photo down and reached for the letters, shuffling them carefully. “Billy, what the hell _are_ all these?”

Slowly, Billy sunk to the floor beside his sister and reached for the polaroid. He stared at it for a few long, tender moments before he spoke. “Did you read them all?”

“I did, yeah,” For some strange reason, Max felt herself getting angry. “Billy, you wrote me a goodbye note. You were going to give me your _car_. What the fuck is this?”

“Oh, don’t act so outraged,” Billy rolled his eyes. “We couldn’t even stand each other back then. Don’t pretend like you would have given a fuck.”\

“Well, we like each other  _ now _ . I give a fuck  _ now _ ,” Max replied, and Billy looked at her with an unreadable expression. “Listen, I don’t expect you to tell me the in’s and out’s of your life, but I do need to know this. Billy, this is important. I need to know…”

“Relax, Max,” Billy interrupted when he saw her getting worked up. “It’s nothing like that. But back then, I was more than willing to do anything it took to get that  _ thing  _ out of me, and I was ready, too. It was either going to kill me, or I was going to kill us both. Or well, kill myself and go down trying to kill  _ him _ . But that… that was a long time ago. It was just a precaution. It’s not the same now.”

That soothed over some of the anxiety that Max was feeling, and she settled back down. He watched her with careful eyes. “What about this one?” she asked, passing Billy the one addressed to his mother. 

He took it from her, glancing over the words, and settled on the crayon drawing. “She never did get my letters,” he said absently. “I stopped sending them after a while. I became quite an artist with all the drawings I made for her,” his expression grew sombre. “She never came back for me, you know. Sometimes I wondered if she had died. That was almost better than thinking that she just abandoned me.”

Max licked her lips. This was feeling more and more like a mistake after every moment. “Billy, we don’t have to do this…”

“No,” Billy said resolutely. “What else do you want me to look at?”

Slowly, tentatively, Max handed him the postcard. “Is this your beach?”

When Billy saw the picture on the postcard, he smiled, and while it wasn’t as big as the one in the poloid, it was the closest that Max had ever seen. “Yeah. I took it from the post office before Neil dragged us out here. I had it pinned up for a while, but Neil thought it was stupid, and I took it down and hid it in here,” he reached out and took the items that Max held in her other hand, and rolled the rock between his fingers. “I got this rock and this seashell from the same beach. Our favourite spot, near the rocks, where the sand was whitest and the waves were seven feet tall.”

“And the key?” Max asked as she handed it to him.

Billy scoffed when he saw it. “Honestly? It’s the key to the shed where I would keep my surfboard. Neil wouldn’t let it anywhere near the house. He said that it was immature and would get sand everywhere. I don’t know why I kept it. I guess I just always held out hope that we would go back. It’s probably gone by now, though. Too many years have passed. They probably got rid of it. Taking up space,” Billy laughed bitterly.

“The ribbon?”

“I brought that myself. Found it, actually. Mum always wore ribbons in her hair and would tie her dresses up with bows. It made me think of her.”

There were so many things that Max wanted to ask. She wanted to show him the other letters, the other photos, the other items that had buried deep down in both his sock drawer and his memories. Instead, she plucked the ring on the chain and the locket from the pile she had made. “What about these? Is that your mum's wedding ring?”

Billy took them carefully, like handling the most fragile piece of porcelain. “Yeah. She gave these to me, actually. It was the only thing of hers that she left behind. She wrapped it and everything,” he looked sad for a moment, but he smoothed that over quickly. I didn’t know what to do with the ring, so I took the locket off the chain and swapped them over. It seemed like the more important of the two. I’ve never been a big fan of lockets.”

Through her eyelashes, hidden by her hair, Max watched him carefully. She had never seen this side to Billy, this tender, quiet side, with the sad look on his face and the careful way he was handling all these little, useless things. Useless maybe, but not meaningless, not insignificant. Even something so unimportant as a rock held all the meaning of the world. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She was so used to him being loud and in-your-face and expressive, angry mostly but sometimes excited and eager and brazen. This subdued, reflective Billy was something she had never seen before. It was odd, but so far, not unwelcomed. 

“Did she…” it was such a meaningless question that Max couldn’t believe she was even asking it, but she needed to get it off her chest before it made her burst with the pressure of keeping it in. “Did she ever give you anything else? Not as a goodbye gift, but as a birthday gift or something?”

A small smile curled at the corners of Billy’s lips as he reached into his shirt to pull out his necklace, the thin silver chain with the small pendant of Saint Christopher embossed on the face of it. “Saint Christopher,” he said softly, yet bitterly, almost like he found it ironic. “Patron saint of travellers. Some think he’s the patron saint of lost souls, too. Though some argue that it’s Saint Jude, although he mostly focuses on lost _causes_. There’s a thin yet palpable difference. My mother made that very clear to me when she gave it to me. It was almost as if she knew.”

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Max said before she could help herself, and Billy raised an eyebrow at her. “I shouldn’t have gone through your things. You had it hidden for a reason. I’m sorry I made you go through all this, I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Billy brushed her off. “It’s fine. I should have known that you would find it eventually. I’m just glad that it was you who found it, and not Neil or Susan. I would never hear the end of that.”

Suddenly, Max had an idea, so brilliant and amazing that she dropped the letters to her lap and reached out and grabbed Billy’s arms, who looked at her with amusement and surprise. “Let's run away. Just you and me, back to California. It’ll be great! We can get you a new surfboard and you can go surfing while I played at a real skatepark and we could go for a walk on the sand hunting for shells and caves and then we could go get ice-cream and-”

“Max,” Billy hushed her, almost humorously, chuckling a little. “Calm down. We can’t do that. You know we can’t. I know that it sounds appealing and that it’s really tempting to get away from this place, but you know as well as I do that we can’t just... run away.”

“Billy-”

“Believe me, kid, I would _love_ to get the hell away from this shit-stink town and this terrible house, but it’s not realistic. I have work. You have school, and friends who will miss you. Maybe during the holidays, I can take you and a few friends down for a day trip, or for the weekend. Maybe I could even convince Harrington to come with me, double up the cars and the kids. The more kids the merrier and all that. But running away and staying there  _ forever _ ? Indefinitely? You know that’s not going to happen.”

Max deflated. “Oh,”

“It’s a good idea, though,” Billy offered kindly. “Just… not right now. Neil will come after us. I mean, he’ll come after _you_. If you still want to go through with your plan when you’re a little bit older, and you can still put up with me by then, then I’ll be more than happy to take you wherever you want to go. But not now. Not while you’re so young. Alight?”

Max nodded. “Billy?” he hummed. “Have you ever thought about going to look for your mum?”

He sighed softly. “I used to. I used to look for her everywhere. But now… I know that there was a reason why she left, and why she never came back. If she really wanted me to find her, I would have by now. But I hope that one day I will find her. Even though I doubt it’ll happen.”

“I’m sorry, Billy.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

They sat there in silence for a few minutes, Billy holding onto his mother's wedding ring and Max holding onto the photo of him and his mother, before Billy spoke again, sounding a little reluctant. “You’d better get out of here before Neil gets home and they start wondering where you’ve gone.”

“Yeah,” she replied as she stood up. “You’re right. You can put the rest of your clothes away, right?”

“I’ve got it,” Billy nodded, pulling the basket closer to him. “And Max?” he called after her. She hummed. He twisted around to face her and held out the letter in an outstretched hand. Clutched loosely between his two fingers was the note addressed to her, filled with harshly crossed out words and tear stains. It waved to her, almost teasingly in his grasp. “You can have this now. I wrote it for you anyway, and I don’t really need it anymore.”

Gulping, Max reached out and took it with gentle, trembling hands, and clutched it to her chest like it was something more than an old piece of soft, yellowed paper covered in black ink and her brother's tears. “Thanks, Billy,” 

When he didn’t turn around, she took it as her opportunity to leave, and let him stew in the pain of his past, the memories of his mother, the bitter taste of better times. His head was bowed, and he didn’t even look at her as she paused in the doorway, light from the hall spilling into the dimly lit room. It really was later than she had expected. “For what it’s worth,” she said. “You’re the best big brother I could have ever asked for, and I’m glad that you’re here with me in Hawkins.”

The last thing she saw before she left the room was Billy’s back tense so hard that his shoulders began to shake, and she pretended that the shaking was from surprise and not from anything else, any other emotion. She shut the door behind her, and the room was plunged into darkness, leaving Billy alone inside it.

“Oh, there you are dear,” Susan was in the kitchen when she caught sight of Max, elbow-deep in a mixing bowl, and Max felt warm from her fingers to her toes at the words, the sight of her mother's rare smile. “You’ve been gone for a while. Where have you been? You dropped off the face of the earth there for a little bit.”

“Sorry mum,” Max replied as she slid into a chair and slipped Billy’s note into her pocket. “I accidentally took a nap. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Late nights doing homework and all that.”

Though Susan’s brow crinkled and her smile wavered, it stayed perfectly fixed in place. “In… Billy’s room? Without Billy?”

“Yeah,” Max shrugged. “I was tired. Billy doesn’t mind me in his room when he’s not there. It’s a nice place to hang out, actually.”

“That’s lovely,” Susan laughed before turning back to her cooking. “You two have come a long way since the wedding, huh?”

Max couldn’t even comprehend how shockingly true that statement was. “Yeah. I guess you could say that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I also think that Billy's mum can be considered abusive as well? Like, she must have been distant before she left Billy, right??? Like, who leaves their kids and isn't considered abusive to an extent?? I don't know. 
> 
> Also, those of you wondering why the paper was called 'soft', my family (Italians) had a history of getting pieces of paper and rubbing them and folding them together until they were so soft that you could use them as tissues or toilet paper and it would feel like three-ply. A little gross, I know, but I can imagine Billy being so frustrated while writing this that he crumbles and opens the ball of paper so many times and fiddles with it while writing it with nerves that it got soft over time. Maybe not as soft as Max described it, because she's biased, but soft all the same.


End file.
